Unhabitable habitat

Habitat is commonly defined not only by spatial qualities responding to basic human needs, but also by a balance between private and collective lives. Some values attributed to domestic space as a way to develop private life are home, autonomy, rest, comfort, privacy and protection, and those attributed to the collective are cohabitation, sharing, community and sociability. While these values are promoted and celebrated in the architectural pedagogy, they are not always applied in practice. Through engaging future architecture practitioners, planners, artists, social scientists, PhD and Master students, the objective of the summer school is to critically explore the ‘unhabitable’.  How does rationalization and safety have in its definition and in the (social) production of spaces? Is it possible to understand unhabitable in terms of ethical (decency) and physical boundaries (what is bearable)? This summer school offers a large array of topics allowing to tackle fundamental political issues related to unhabitable habitat such as: informality, vulnerability, and utopias of common values. From specific environmental issues and different geographical contexts, from non-visible to the nearby objects, our aim is to collectively explore the question of institutionalized and non-institutionalized ’inhabitability‘.